THE MOIL

Etienne’s Two Circumcisions

(Dec 23/05)
Etienne O’Shonasey was circumcised the day after he was born, and again the day before his eleventh birthday party. The first doctor had undiagnosed shingles and went squirrelly in the head shortly after. His license to practice medicine was revoked, and he was kicked out of the College of Surgeons and General Practitioners of the Province of Quebec. The second one was Jewish. The first doctor took way too much off the top, leaving a band of scar tissue around the middle of Etienne’s penis, making it all but impossible to urinate without fainting and seeing sparkly stars. The second doctor, who studied urology at the Universite de Laval and drove a Ford Lancer, had to perform a skin graft using skin from the small of Etienne’s back.

Once Etienne was old enough to read, he looked up the word prepuce, a word his parents said a lot, often spelling it when he was in ear-shot, which made finding it in the Webster’s all that much easier. The day he found the word prepuce in the dictionary, Etienne made a pact with himself that he would name his first dog prepuce, regardless of whether his parents liked it or not, or found it stupid and unseemly. His parents caved in, not wanting to add to the trauma their son had already experienced, but suggested that he change the u to an a, and call his first dog Prapuce. Etienne agreed, and bought Prapuce a studded black dog collar with the money he saved up from turning over Gazette boxes and scooping out the change, generally dimes and nickels and the odd quarter. Two weeks after Etienne got him, Prapuce was hit by the Pom bakery truck and dragged several blocks caught up under the back wheel well and had to be put down with one of his father’s old torn up shirts soaked in ether. The next day after school Rupert told me that he was bumper hitching the Pom truck at the time, and saw Prapuce stuck underneath panting and growling like mad, one of Roman Ramsbottom’s woolen mittens stuck in his ear.